Towards 1818 Comte became associated as friend and disciple with a man who was destined to exercise a very decisive influence upon the turn of his speculation. Henry, count of Saint Simon, was second cousin of the famous duke of Saint Simon, the friend of the Regent, and author of the most important set of memoirs in a language that is so incomparably rich in memoirs. He was now nearly sixty, and if he had not gained a serious reputation, he had at least excited the curiosity and interest of his contemporaries by the social eccentricities of his life, by the multitude of his schemes and devices, and by the fantastic ingenuity of his political ideas. Saint Simon's most characteristic faculty was an exuberant imagination, working in the sphere of real things. Scientific discipline did nothing for him; he had never undergone it, and he never felt its value. He was an artist in social construction; and if right ideas, or the suggestion of right ideas, sometimes came into his head, about history, about human progress, about a stable polity, such ideas were not the products of trains of ordered reasoning; they were the intuitional glimpses of the poet, and consequently as they professed to be in real matter, even the right ideas were as often as not accompanied by wrong ones. The young Comte, now twenty, was enchanted by the philosophic veteran. In after years he so far forgot himself as to write of Saint Simon as a depraved quack, and to deplore his connection with him as purely mischievous. While the connection lasted he thought very differently. Saint Simon is described as the most estimable and lovable of men, and the most delightful in his relations; he is the worthiest of philosophers. Even after the association had come to an end, and at the very moment when Comte was congratulating himself on having thrown off the yoke, he honestly admits that Saint Simon's influence has been of powerful service in his philosophic education. 'I certainly,' he writes to his most intimate friend, 'am under great personal obligations to Saint Simon; that is to say, he helped in a powerful degree to launch me in the philosophical direction that I have now definitely marked out for myself, and that I shall follow without looking back for the rest of my life.' Even if there were no such unmistakable expressions as these, the most cursory glance into Saint Simon's writings is enough to reveal the thread of connection between the ingenious visionary and systematic thinker. We see the debt, and we also see that when it is stated at the highest possible, nothing has really been taken either from Comte's claims as a powerful original thinker, or from his immeasurable pre-eminence over Saint Simon in intellectual grasp and vigour and coherence. As high a degree of originality may be shown in transformation as in invention, as Molière and Shakespeare have proved in the region of dramatic art. In philosophy the conditions are not different. _Il faut prendre son